As with any voting process,
this year’s Hall of Fame election was not without its share of controversies.
The one that stirs the pot with the most vigor is the ongoing debate about what
should be done with players who either used or were suspected of using
steroids. I’ll get to that topic at a later date. For me, however, the more
interesting controversy is the fact the Greg Maddux was not voted in
unanimously. Not only that, he didn’t break Tom Seaver’s
record for highest voting percentage. Of the nearly 600 voters, 16 didn’t
believe Maddux was a Hall of Famer. The man had more wins than anyone in the
last 50 years, won four consecutive Cy Young awards, 18 Gold Gloves, led the
league in ERA four times (ERA+ five times), innings pitched five times,
shutouts four times, WHIP four times… you get the idea. He was an amazing
pitcher, a true inner circle performer and certainly one of the 10 best
pitchers ever, possibly even top 5. More importantly, his statistical record
appeals to all types of analysts and evaluators: he’s got the wins for the old
school and his record is rife with sabremetric black
ink. He’s as much a no-brainer for the Hall of Fame as there ever has been. So
the fact that there are 16 people - much less 16 voters - who don’t think he
belongs in the Hall of Fame is quite astounding.

Still, I’m not here to call
people idiots. No, my purpose is to figure out how someone – anyone - might
ever get close to 100% of the vote for the Hall. What does a player have to do
for every voter to acknowledge that ‘yes’, this guy belongs in the Hall of
Fame? In looking at Maddux’s career there are a couple of things that aren’t on
his resume. For example, he never led the league in strikeouts. In fact, he
topped 200 Ks in a season only once. He never threw a no-hitter. And he wasn’t
very physically intimidating. And he didn’t really have a cool nickname. I
mean, “Mad Dog”?Really?And well, that’s about it.

So my thinking is that
we’ll never see someone get 100% because there’ll always be at least one
malcontent. But 99%... that seems achievable, at least in theory. There could
still be five ‘no’ votes and the candidate would still top 99%. All I need to
find is a player who was better than Greg Maddux and then campaign like crazy
over the internet, hoping it goes viral enough to convince the BBWAA voters.
Um, yeah.

But who?

I actually have someone in
mind and as luck would have it, he is due to be eligible for the first time
next year: Randy Johnson. So from this point on my mission will be to get “the
Big Unit” inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame with the highest voting
percentage ever. Why is he the guy? Because he is quite probably the greatest
left-handed starting pitcher in the history of baseball.

Before Randy Johnson, the
discussion of the best lefties ever always circled around four pitchers: Lefty
Grove, Warren Spahn, Sandy Koufax, Steve Carlton. So
let’s compare, with their all-time ranks in parenthesis:

Koufax’ career was famously
cut short by injury at age 31, but he was obviously on track to produce
incredible totals. However, the fact that he retired at his peak might actually
help his candidacy as he never had a decline phase of his career where his rate
stats would deteriorate. Randy Johnson is the only one of these pitchers who
pitched entirely in the 5-man rotation era. Still, Johnson fares quite well by
comparison despite getting fewer starts. Where he really excels, however, is
comparing his peak years:

Peak (average per year)

NamewinsKsWHIPWARERA+IPCGSho

Randy Johnson
(97-02)203401.0688.717724883

Lefty Grove (30-36)221401.2198.1160255213

Warren Spahn (49-54)201621.1926.5129291244

Sandy Koufax (61-66)222860.9707.8156272196

Steve Carlton
(69-74)172251.2605.7122282183

As amazing as Koufax and
Grove were at their peaks, at least using the metrics that compare players to
their contemporaries, Johnson was better. Here’s another thing to chew on:
opponent’s batting average. Here are the best marks posted by left-handers in
history:

Herb Score.195

Sandy Koufax.202

Sid Fernandez.206

Clayton Kershaw.207

Sam McDowell.210

Babe Ruth.216

Randy Johnson.218

It’s not surprising to see
Koufax here as he was one of the best at preventing hitters from making contact
or getting on base. It might be surprising to see Babe Ruth’s name here. Yes,
he was an excellent pitcher before being moved to the outfield full-time. But
here is Randy Johnson again.

Making this even more
impressive is that Johnson faced almost exclusively right-handed line-ups. The
reason is because early on his career he had a well-earned reputation for
wildness and a pitcher throwing 100 mph without knowing what zip code the pitch
would end up in was not exactly comforting to left-handed batters. Star players
didn’t want to take a chance on getting beaned and
managers knew that lesser lefty bats would be useless. To wit, Shawn Green,
Barry Bonds and Todd Helton are the only left-handed hitters to have
accumulated at least 50 career plate appearances against Johnson. Only a dozen
lefties accumulated more than 30 plate appearances against him. By comparison,
more than 120 right-handers faced him more than 30 times.

(*) The Cy Young Award
wasn’t officially handed out until 1956. However, baseball historian Bill Deane
wrote an excellent piece in the first Total Baseball annual chronicling the
voting history of each major award – Cy Young, MVP and Rookie of the Year – and
then compiled a list of hypothetical winners for the years preceding their
existence. Lefty Grove won six of his hypothetical Cy Youngs.

Here again, Johnson compares
favorably. In his only World Series, Johnson won both of his starts, holding
the vaunted Yankee offense to two runs in two games, and then came back on no
rest to pitch the final four outs of the D-backs’ championship Game 7 win. His
World Series ERA: 1.04. In championship play – one NLCS, one ALCS and one World
Series – he was 5-1 in 48.2 innings pitched with an ERA of 1.48, allowing 39 baserunners (WHIP of 0.801) while striking out 51 batters.

How about Bill James’ noted
black ink test, accounting for the number of times a player led his league in a
category:

Black ink leader

NameKsIPERA

Randy Johnson924

Lefty Grove709

Warren Spahn443

Sandy Koufax425

Steve Carlton551

Again, Johnson looks very
good. In the history of the game, he is 1st all-time in strikeout
rate (10.61 per 9 innings), 2nd all-time in total strikeouts (4875), 5th
all-time in wins for a left-hander (303), 9th all-time in WAR for
pitchers and 2nd overall for lefties (104.3), 22nd all-time
in ERA+ and 5th overall for lefties (135), 7th all time
in Win Probability Added and 2nd overall for a lefty (53.19), and 29th
all-time in winning percentage and 8th overall for lefties (.646).
In the modern era (since 1903), he holds four of the top 10 strikeout seasons
and five of the top 11. Nolan Ryan, by comparison, only holds three of the top
10 strikeout seasons. Since the advent of the DH, of the pitchers who have
retired he is 9th overall in FIP but 2nd best for a lefty
(3.20). He is the only pitcher in history with 4000 or more strikeouts but
fewer than 1500 walks.

The baseball writers were
rightly impressed with the number of complete games Jack Morris tossed as well
as the number of games he took into the ninth inning, albeit not impressed enough
to put him in the Hall. Well, Johnson has some of that mojo,
too. In the 5-man rotation era, only Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux and Morris
completed more games. But Johnson was tremendously stalwart in another way as
well. In 1995, the season that saved baseball in Seattle, Johnson threw 120 pitches or more
for the Mariners in each of his final seven starts including a one-game playoff
win versus the Angels. That season he topped 120 pitches nineteen times, 140
pitches four times including once in Cleveland
in which he threw 160 pitches. For his career he topped 120 pitches thrown in a
game 210 times. From 1990 until 2002 he averaged fifteen such outings per
season, and that’s despite missing much of the 1996 season due to back surgery.
He topped 140 pitches in a game 41 times and threw 150 or more 9 times. Maybe
back in the 1960s people would not have thought much of that kind of usage but
in an era in which pitch counts are kept religiously in order to protect
pitchers, and anyone exceeding 120 pitches prompts the blogosphere to gnash its
collective teeth in biblical proportions, those numbers are absolutely
mind-boggling.

Lastly, I’ll throw in
something completely subjective: media exposure. Greg Maddux teamed up with Tom
Glavine to make the famed Nike “Chicks dig the long ball” ad. Great commercial,
but that was it. Maddux largely stayed away from the spotlight. Johnson,
conversely, had a number of memorable media appearances. His “Mr. Snappy”
commercial for ESPN (where he demonstrated the “grip” of his famous slider –
the ball was resting on the back of his hand) was one of the best ads of that
multi-year campaign. He also had two very memorable All-Star appearances. In
1993, he threw a fastball about 3 feet over lefty John Kruk’s head, prompting
the batter to check his heart and then stand as far away from the plate as
possible for the rest of the appearance. In the 1997 All Star Game he had a
similar face-off versus another left-hander, Larry Walker. Only on this
occasion Walker
simply put his batting helmet on backwards, then switched to the right-handed
batters box. Johnson had to hide his laughter in his glove.

Even when something in a
game went against him, Johnson found a way to make it work for him. In 1997,
Mark McGwire hit one of the most impressive home runs in history, reaching the
fifth deck in Seattle’s
Kingdome off a Johnson fastball. The next day, he held a press conference to
playfully suggest that McGwire’s feat came with some special assistance, that
his bat had been corked. He then produced a souvenir kid’s bat with a wine cork
glued to the top of it as the reputed weapon McGwire used.

Johnson was not just a
great player. Some of his feats are so legendary they are unthinkable in
today’s game. A player that great yet self-deprecating with such a refined
sense of humor… that’s the kind of player I think everyone can vote for.